The anti-Juno

Today, the most simultaneously overrated and underrated film in recent memory, Juno, arrives on DVD. I hate to be all Spike Lee and say, skip that, watch this, but uh, skip that and watch this*.

See, although I don't even hate Juno (despite everything, I enjoyed it, contrary to how I may have come off...twice), but I finally figured out exactly why I couldn't connect with its snotty-assed namesake: Juno MacGuff is the antithesis of My So-Called Life's Angela Chase, who's quite possibly my favorite teenage girl of all time (real or fiction). Juno is a know-it-all; Angela is a think-it-all. Juno is extroverted enough to be exempt from real self-consciousness (i.e. she has no idea how obnoxious she is); Angela is a painful self-examiner (however wrong her observations about herself are). Juno's an emotional superhero; Angela's ready to self-destruct at the tiniest shard of visceral kryptonite. Juno's intellect is lightning-fast and infallible (even if she doesn't know Greek from Roman mythology); Angela's musings, even when spot-on, are worded goofily enough to feel perpetually stumbled upon.

It's this last point that I feel is most important: while Juno is essentially the extension of Diabo Cody's considerable ego, Angela Chase is a warts-and-all portrait of a well-rounded human. She's whiny, annoying, selfish, clever, insightful, beautiful. And hilarious! Rewatching MSCL via last year's DVD release reminded me how awesome Angela's dialogue is, especially her narration. I haven't seen any sort of clip reel that collects her greatest hits, so I made one. The wisdom of Angela Chase follows in all of its endearingly laughable splendor:

I don't want to video you out, so below is a transcript of Angela's musings. I think they might be even funnier in print:

"It's like sometimes, people fill their minds with all these stupid things, you know? To keep themselves from thinking about, y'know, what's really important."

"Sometimes I think if my mother wasn't so good at pretending to be happy, she'd be better at actually being happy."

"The sad truth is, my breasts have come between us."

"Hatred can become like food. It gives you this energy. You can, like, live off it."

"I cannot bring myself to eat a well-balanced meal in front of my mother. It just means too much to her. I mean, if you stop to think about, like, chewing. What it really is. How people just do it. Like, in public."

"Maybe teachers have a hidden life where they're actually, like, human. Where they have, I don't know, dignity. Or maybe not."

"It's so weird that teachers actually, like, live places."

"Field trips are so intense. It's like everybody's been let out of their cages or something. And we're all roaming around. Loose."

"There's something about Sunday night that really makes you wanna kill yourself. Especially if you've just been totally made a fool of by the only person you'll ever love and you have a Geometry midterm on Monday, which you still haven't studied for because you can't because Brian Krakow has your textbook and you're too embarrassed to even deal with it. And your little sister's completely finished with her homework, which is just, like, so simple and mindless a child could do it. And that creepy 60 Minutes watch that sounds like your whole life ticking away."

"When someone dies young it's like they stay that way. Forever. Like a vampire."

"You know how sometimes the last sentence you said, like, echoes in your brain and it just keeps sounding stupider? And you have to say something else just to make it stop?"

"It's so weird when you see someone you just dreamed about. Like it's gonna show."

"When you call someone's name, like, kind of loud and they don't hear you, it makes you feel really lonely."

"Walking into someone's house for the first time is like entering another country. Not that I've ever been to another country."

"Like cheerleaders. Can't people just cheer on their own? Like, to themselves?"

"You know the karma in this house is, like, ridiculous...Yeah, it's really low. Or dark. Or whatever it is that happens to karma."

"I thought at least by age 15, I would have a love life. But I don't even have a like life."

"I couldn't stop thinking about it. The, like, fact of it. That people had sex. That they just had it. That sex was this thing that people had. Like a rash. Or a rottweiler. Everything started to seem, like, pornographic or something. Like, Miss Krysanowski has sex. So does Mr. Katimsky. They both have sex. They could have sex together, like, right now. I am, like, the sickest person."

"The thought that I might be seeing Jordan Catalano in a few hours was, like, impossible to comprehend. Like when they first tell you about infinity."

"Because it is a big deal. I mean, sex made your whole life start and if you think about life as, like, a circle or something, then sex and death are the same...Look, I'm not saying they're the same. I mean, I've thought about having sex with you, and, god, I've never seriously thought about killing you."

Mom: "You know what you really should do? Soak a washcloth in some steaming hot water. Apply it very gently to your chin, make sure you have a swab handy..."Angela: "Mom!"Mom: "What? I'm trying to help. What is wrong?"Angela: "Just the word 'swab.'"

"School is a battlefield for your heart. So when Rayanne Graff told me my hair was holding me back, I had to listen. 'Cause she wasn't just talking about my hair; she was talking about my life."

"It had become the focus of everything. It was all I could feel, all I could think about. It blotted out the rest of my face. The rest of my life. Like the zit had become the truth about me."

"It just seems like you agree to have a certain personality or something. For no reason. Just to make things easier for everyone. But when you think about it, I mean, how do you know if it's even you?"

"I just think people wanna believe things about people, and so they decide certain things are true. And they don't even ask. And it's not fair! 'Cause you have to live with it anyway."

"People always say how you should be yourself, like yourself is this definite thing. Like a toaster, or something. Like you can know what it is, even. But every so often, I'll have, like, a moment, when just being myself in my life, right where I am, is, like, enough."

"What I was thinking as, like, a New Year's resolution is to stop getting so caught up in my own thoughts. 'Cause I'm, like, way too introspective. I think."

"But what if not thinking turns me into this really shallow person? I better rethink this becoming less introspective thing."

*I don't really think you should skip Juno, or anything for that matter. You should experience any and every bit of pop culture for yourself. So rent Juno. See if I care. But just know that Angela is cooler.

Comments

Spot on with the comparison of the two. Reading through these MSCL quotes makes me wonder why I don't own it on DVD yet. The show was one of the most accurate, universal portrayals of high school I've ever seen. What I loved about Angela was that she was so realistic character in her, well, un-specialness. There was nothing flashy about her; she wasn't a star student or the popular girl. She was just a kid dealing with the typical bullshit of high school and trying to figure it out, stumbling upon realizations with the same naive surprise that most kids do. There was none of the annoying, flowery syntax and excessive verbiage of the Dawson's Creek gang; Angela used "like" as much as I did (and, um, still do).

Also? I still cry every time I watch the scene where Rayanne and Angela perform the scene from Our Town.

PS I would STILL make out with Jordan Catalano in the high school boiler room if the opportunity arose.

i loooved juno, though i definitely agree with your comments on her being annoying, and that the movie itself is overrated and underrated at the same time. "honest to blog" is one of the most obnoxious phrases to have ever been written down, and spoken. and then played in theaters across the country. i never thought this movie would be the stuff of oscars, yet it won best original screenplay. it's given hope to many aspiring screenwriters, cause if that movie won then i could certainly write something oscar worthy.

It's like "30-Something" for teenagers ("Teen-something"). I used to watch for the Jordan Catalano scenes only. And I'm sorry Rayanne, but you look 30. I wish the show had been about Ricky. It needed a lead with some spark. I know I blaspheme. Lindsay and all her cohorts in "Freaks and Geeks" did it for me.

My So-Called Life is hands down the ONLY accurate depiction of teenage life I've ever seen. It was the only thing I could watch with my mother and not fight about. I'd point to the screen and say "This really happens!" Watching it I didn't need to explain why I felt some way or how I did anything; it was all up there to see, played out by Claire Danes and Jared Leto. Letting that show goes was one of the worst things network tv could have done. It dumbed down everything for teens and tweens and now we're stuck with The Hills and Super Sweet 16. BRING BACK SMART TELEVISION FOR YOUNG PEOPLE!!!

At the time it was actually on TV, I thought MSCL was kind of annoying, but yet it showed these flashes of brilliance that sucked me right in, and it seemed like someone actually LISTENED to what goes on when you're that age and committed it to paper. And I really WANT to like Juno, but as the buzz and hype have overtaken them, it just seems like Cody and Page have bought their own bullshit and begun to believe that they, like, invented the entire film medium about girls, or something. Just ONCE I would like to hear one of these Hollywood "it" people respond to just ONE of the inane interviewers with "Jesus, it's just a MOVIE, it's not curing cancer for Chrissake!"

Just reading those made me tear up at work a little bit. Angela was so real. I also loved when she said something about the yearbook being a joke because if you made a book about what high school was really about it would be a REALLY upsetting book.

I think the best thing about Angela's musings is that they still hold true in my life today. As a teenager, it's like she was speaking my words, but I don't look back and think, "How trivial." I think, "Goddamn, Sundays are the most depressing day ever. And why do I imagine my boss having sex when that's completely gross?" I mean, as teenagers, we were thinking in intellectual ways just on a smaller scale. MSCL isn't condescending, and in a lot of ways, Diablo Cody's attempt to speak "teen" was. But that's why I enjoyed Juno, and don't pretend to see it as a realistic portrayal...of anything.

Also, why didn't you come see Jordan Catalano/Jared Leto at the Angelika and help ask the important questions? (Namely, where IS Tino?)

#1 I still love Jordan Catalano. He is everything a highschool crush was.

Sometimes I remember this scene in MSCL where Rayanne get's mad at her mom because she only makes appetizers for dinner and doesn't cook a real meal. Now I'm almost 30 and wonder if I'll end up like her mom when I'm eating my eggrolls and mini samosas for dinner.

I think there comes a time when you realize that Brian is so amazing and Jordan is so sucky, and that is the time that you also have no more sympathy for the whiny little fuckers in The Breakfast Club.

Don't forget: "Sometimes it seems like we're all living in some kind of prison. And the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It's good to get really dressed up once in a while. And admit the truth: that when you really look closely? People are so strange and so complicated that they're actually... beautiful. Possibly even me."

I love me some Claire Danes (the girl really knows how to pause) and I really enjoyed the show when it was on, but watching the clip made me focus on how often the word "like" was said on that show. I bet if you, like, counted the number of times "like" was said, it would be, like, in the thousands. :)

The stupid throwaway MSCL reference in Juno was maybe the moment that pissed me off the most about that movie. "Hey, let's throw in a character named Tino who we never see, who's in a band, and people that grew up watching and loving that show will get it and know we're super cool and referential like that." Shut up.

I met Wilson Cruz after his starring turn on Broadway in RENT (which was just a happy coincidence, we didn't know he was in it when we bought the tickets). I got his autograph and my picture taken with him and it was all I could do to not squeal, "Riiiiccckkkkyyyy!". I loved My So-Called Life. Sigh.
JulesHouse of Jules